Third Light has been shut down: here's what to do next

PhotoShelter bought Third Light in 2022. Now they've closed it down and migrated all remaining customers over to PhotoShelter for Brands.

If you're a Third Light customer, you didn't get much say in that. And from what we're hearing, some customers aren't happy about it.

So should you move to PhotoShelter by default, or use this as opportunity to find something that actually works for your team?

What happened to Third Light?

Third Light was well-liked by marketing and creative teams who needed something more capable than Google Drive but without the overhead of a full enterprise system. Its flagship product, Chorus, had a good reputation for search and collaboration.

PhotoShelter acquired Third Light in January 2022, backed by Clearhaven Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm. And with that, they picked up Third Light's 300-odd customers, a UK office in Cambridge, and a capable product.

Then they slowly wound it down, switching Third Light customers over to their own platform. Now it's gone entirely, and all remaining customers are being moved to PhotoShelter for Brands.

Should you just go with PhotoShelter?

Sticking with Photoshelter might feel like the obvious default. But it’s worth finding out whether it’s actually going to work well for you and your team. Here are the pros and cons of sticking with Photoshelter. 

Pros of staying with PhotoShelter

Photoshelter is an active, maintained platform. There's a real product roadmap, regular updates, and a support team behind it.

If your team is already stretched, not having to manage a migration project yourself has genuine value. PhotoShelter handles the move, and for busy teams that matters.

And it's worth being honest: for certain types of organisations (like sports teams, universities, media companies with large photo libraries) PhotoShelter has a solid track record.

Cons of staying with Photoshelter 

Photoshelter will auto-migrate you to their platform, unless you tell them otherwise. But this doesn’t mean it's the right platform. 

For starters, pricing isn't published. You have to go through sales to find out what you'll pay. From what third-party data suggests, contracts for brands typically start around $10,000 a year and go up from there. That's a significant shift if you're used to Third Light's costs.

It's also not a continuation of Third Light. It's a different product with a different interface, different workflows, different terminology. Your team still has to learn a new system at an already disruptive moment. And according to its G2 reviews (and what we hear from customers evaluating it), it can come with a steep learning curve and a frustrating onboarding process. 

What’s more, Photoshelter will charge you a large fee if you want to move away from them. Keep reading to learn more about that. 

Our honest take

PhotoShelter is a capable platform. For the right type of organisation, it'll be fine: providing you have the budget and the patience.

But if you want transparent pricing, a simpler day-to-day experience, and a tool built for ecommerce it's probably not the best fit.

What to look for in a Third Light alternative

If you're evaluating options, here’s a few things worth prioritising:

• Pricing you can actually see. If you can't find a number on their website, costs are usually higher than you'd like.
• All the features, from day one. Integrations, API access, unlimited users — these shouldn't be upsells. Look for a tool where everything's included and you're just paying for storage and usage.
• A team that helps you migrate. This disruption is already being done to you. The last thing you need is a new platform that leaves you to figure out the move yourself.

We’ve written an article that covers some great Photoshelter alternatives. Alternatively, you can download our free digital asset management worksheet to find the best tool for your brand. 

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How to get your files out of PhotoShelter

Once you've decided you want to explore alternatives, you've got a practical problem: actually getting your assets out. Here's where it gets a bit annoying.

Getting files out of PhotoShelter: Hard mode

PhotoShelter gives you two options for exporting your files yourself.

Option one: according to one customer we talked to, PhotoShelter is charging $2,500 for them to ship you a USB drive with all your assets on it. 

Option two: go into each Gallery manually and export the files to an FTP site yourself. Which sounds fine, until you realise many accounts have thousands of Galleries. Not realistic.

The third option, if you're technically minded, is to use PhotoShelter's API to download everything programmatically, preserving your Collection and Gallery structure as you go. Here's the approach:

1. Get an API key at engineering.photoshelter.com, then authenticate via /psapi/v4.0/authenticate with your email and password to get a session cookie.
2. Walk your library structure. Get the details of your top-level Collections using /psapi/v4.0/collections, then recurse into their children (which can be more Collections or Galleries). Use the per_page and page parameters — without them, larger accounts will hit the 10,000 result hard limit.
3. Pull the files from each Gallery, using /psapi/v4.0/galleries/{gallery_id}//children to get the media IDs, then download the originals using /psapi/v4.0/media/{media_id}/download
4. Build in retry logic from the start. Large libraries will hit timeouts, and you want the script to resume rather than start from scratch.

Doable if you have a developer. But it's not a quick job. They’re really not trying to make it easy for you, are they?

Getting files out of PhotoShelter: Easy mode

Or, you could switch to Dash. Not only do you get a smooth, beautifully-designed DAM platform with affordable pricing, we’ll also handle the migration for you. 

Assuming you can give us access to PhotoShelter’s API, we’ll do the work to bring your files and your folder structure across. We won’t bill you for a $2,500 USB drive, and you can skip the API wrangling. It's part of our onboarding, and it's free.

Why teams pick Dash instead of PhotoShelter

Dash is built for marketing and creative teams at growing ecommerce and DTC brands. That means:

• Everything included on every plan: Unlimited users, AI-powered search, Shopify integration, retailer portals so stockists can help themselves to assets, API access, version control. No add-ons.
• Transparent pricing: starting from £79 / $109 a month, based on storage and downloads. Plus. there’s no sales call required to find out what you'll pay.
• A migration tool built for exactly this situation: We'll bring your PhotoShelter files and folder structure across for you. Most teams are up and running in a matter of weeks.
• No long contracts: If Dash isn't right for you, 30 days' notice is all it takes.

What to do next

Don't just let the default happen. Use this as a nudge to find something that actually fits.

Start with our DAM comparison worksheet to map out what you actually need before committing to anything. Or if you want to see how Dash works for teams like yours, book a demo and we'll walk you through it.

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